Tony Pomerleau: The art of the dealmaker

Defying life's limits, Tony Pomerleau at 95 persists in his quest for the best possible deal

Nov. 24, 2012

Tony Pomerleau, 95, stands in the window of Mill River Furniture in Newport at its grand opening. Pomerleau owns the building -- which happens to be where he got his first job at age 14 in 1931 -- trimming windows at JJ Newberry. Pomerleau continues to be an active business man, philanthropist, storyteller and dealmaker extraordinaire. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Tony Pomerleau, 95, helps cut the ribbon at Mill River Furniture in Newport at its grand opening. Pomerleau owns the building -- which happens to be where he got his first job at age 14 in 1931 -- trimming windows at JJ Newberry. Pomerleau continues to be an active business man, philanthropist, storyteller and dealmaker extraordinaire. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

A busy month

The next three weeks will be a sort of Pomerleau parade, with an awards dinner for real estate magnate Antonio Pomerleau followed by three holiday parties he holds each year: TUESDAY: The Vermont Chamber of Commerce will honor Pomerleau as Citizen of the Year with a dinner for 300 at the Hilton in Burlington. DEC. 1: National Guard All-Ranks Military Ball. Twelve hundred members of the Guard and their spouses celebrate with dinner, a performance by country singer Jamie Lee Thurston, and dancing. DEC. 9: Pomerleau Holiday Party for several hundred lower-income children in Burlington. By invitation. DEC. 15: Pomerleau Holiday Party, Newport. Afternoon party and meal for lower-income children and their families at Eastside Restaurant. By invitation.

Tony Pomerleau visits his family plot at Resurrection Park in South Burlington where he has gravestones placed for himself and his family on November 19, 2012. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Tony Pomerleau, 95, points to photos of his daughters at his home in Burlington. Pomerleau continues to be an active business man, philanthropist, storyteller and dealmaker extraordinaire. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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NEWPORT — Tony Pomerleau leans on his cane and steps into Mill River Furniture on Main Street, just in time for its grand opening ceremony. A dozen people converge on him, filings drawn to a magnet.

The mayor greets him. City councilors introduce themselves. Two local reporters quiz him about the fate of the city’s only grocery store if plans go forward to redevelop his strip mall into a hotel and convention center. The head of the downtown association calls him over for a ribbon-cutting photo. “We need you Tony, right in the middle,” she says.

The 95-year-old, white-maned shopping center king of Vermont is in his element, back in his native town with a captive audience. He holds court for nearly an hour while the furniture store owner whose event this is left in the background.

“I was 12 when I started work here,” Pomerleau begins by recalling his days as a stockboy and window dresser when this building was a J.J. Newberry’s five-and-dime. “I had a knack for windows. This is where I started my success. I learned the customer has to see the merchandise if you want to sell.”

Today, he owns the building. “I put $400,000 into it to fix it up,” he says, his words carrying the French-Canadian inflection he has never lost.

He jokes that store owner Skip Gray was “kinda chicken” about moving to Main Street from a much smaller store in the Pomerleau shopping center. His eyes sparkle. He laughs along with the audience at his own jokes.

In a voice graveled by age, he detours into stories that have become his stock in trade. The anecdotes reel off as if from a tape recorder, told and retold in almost exactly the same words.

“It’s not what you pay for something, it’s what you can get for it,” he tells the cluster of people, citing a real estate deal 40 years in the past. “I made $237,000 in 90 days” he says of a tract of farmland bought, subdivided and sold for three times what he paid.

He laments the just-announced closing of the Eveready battery plant in St. Albans. The company’s problem, he says with finality, is that they didn’t change with the times by developing new products.

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“You gotta do something different from the other fellow,” he says. “There’s a time limit on everything — except me.” The line draws a chuckle from his clutch of listeners, as it always does.

Grace, the youngest of Pomerleau’s 10 children, glances up from browsing among bedroom sets.

“He does love an audience,” she says.

'See the smoke coming out?'

On a late November night, the outside of Pomerleau’s big house on DeForest Heights in Burlington is a neon carnival of Christmas.

Light-bulb-lit reindeer charge across the west lawn pulling a sleigh of presents. Shoulder-high candy canes stick from the north lawn. Christmas lights cling to the eaves and swathe the trees in all directions.

Pomerleau opens the door for guests and pads down a hallway in his slippers to point through the windows of his home office.

“That’s a new one this year,” he says with childlike pleasure, pointing to a lighted train on the north lawn.

“See, the wheels go around,” he says, as lights on the train blink to mimic movement. “See the smoke coming out there. Isn’t that cute?” More lights blink.

As a very young child, Pomerleau spent four or five years — the time varies in the telling — in a kind of iron corset after a bad fall when he was two. His father’s Barton farm burned. The family moved to Newport. The Depression struck. His father’s grocery burned.

In his telling, young Tony went to work barely out of elementary school, making deals, subcontracting the mowing of lawns and washing of cars to other kids or out-of-work men and taking a hefty cut of the pay.

His stories of childhood Christmases are happy ones, of horses and sleighs lined up outside the church for midnight Mass, the bells as the sleighs jingled home, the sound of carols.

But there is another memory as well. He walks into the living rooms and leans against the piano, its top invisible under the rows of photos of his children.

“I was 12 or 13. One day I heard my father say to my mother, ‘This is the first Christmas I can’t afford any presents.’ I went down to the bank and took out $25 — that was money in those days — to give him.”

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“I came from nothing,” he often says, setting the backdrop for stories of his successes.

The big living room where an army of kids once played seems empty on a pre-Thanksgiving evening. Country station WOKO plays loudly on the radio.

In the kitchen, an aide is helping Pomerleau’s 93-year-old wife, Rita, with her dinner. Alzheimer’s disease has slowly claimed her.

“It’s the worst damn disease,” he says. She speaks very little, but still holds his hand and kisses him, he says.

“Come back tomorrow night,” he says as he ushers out his visitors. “We’re putting up more lights. It’s going to look even better.”

'This business doesn't happen by itself'

Antonio B. Pomerleau made his first million before he was 45 and has made millions more since. His supermarket-anchored strip malls dot nearly two dozen towns in Vermont and upstate New York. He and his son Ernie have a staff of 25 to help run their real estate businesses.

But here is the patriarch, spending a sunny November afternoon in the artificial light of a windowless Newport bowling alley two hours drive from his Burlington home, talking intently and at length to a tenant whose lease payment cannot amount to more than loose change in the Pomerleau business.

There are gumball machines along the wall, a Nascar-themed light over the pool table and an echoing feel to the place. A lone father and son hurl heavy balls down one of the 10 lanes.

“How’s it going?” Pomerleau asks as he lowers himself carefully into a plastic chair beside a row of bowling balls.

“About like last year,” Yvan Parenteau, the alley’s owner, says.

“That wasn’t too good,” Pomerleau says.

In fact, the business is struggling. Parenteau has trouble making the rent. He is worried about his fate if the mall is converted to a convention center. Pomerleau makes no promises, only says no deal has been signed yet. “I never skin a bear until I’ve shot it,” he’s been telling everyone he meets today.

After an hour, Pomerleau pushes himself up and says goodbye. He climbs into his Mercedes for the trip back to Burlington.

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“Now you see my life. This business doesn’t happen by itself,” he says of his real estate empire.

He lists communities where bowling alleys, some of which he built, have closed. Changing times, he says. He has adjusted Parenteau’s rent, allowing him to pay more in the winter, less in summer. He has suggested prize-giving gimmicks to draw in customers, and arranged for the bowling alley to have a more prominent sign on the road. Later, Parenteau will say of Pomerleau, “You couldn’t have a better landlord.”

Still, Pomerleau says, “If he can’t pay the rent, he won’t be here next year.”

'I'm the boss'

A stairlift descends almost noiselessly from the third floor at Follett House, the elegant 19th-century Burlington mansion the Pomerleaus saved and restored as their offices. Tony Pomerleau climbs off the lift, which he has used since a knee injury.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he greets a visitor and leads the way into his office. He is surrounded by signs of success, from the million-dollar view of Lake Champlain outside the window, to the picture of himself with President Reagan.

He rises each day, puts on a suit and tie and goes to the office. He takes business calls over breakfast and into the dinner hour.

The Pomerleau family owns shopping centers in 18 Vermont communities and four in New York. Most are strip malls anchored by a supermarket. They are small by comparison with a University Mall or the Williston big-box stores. Pomerleau’s single largest holding is the Shelburne Road Plaza in Burlington, valued at $14.6 million.

“What the hell would I want a mall for?” he says. “I make a lot of money the way I do things.”

He spotted the attraction of shopping malls early, understood the importance of location, pinched pennies, negotiated hard with his lenders, gave up higher rents for a percentage of a store’s gross.

He has transferred ownership of many of his holdings to his children, about $50 million worth, he says. Ernie Pomerleau, 65, runs the day-to-day operations of the family businesses and does many of his own deals.

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So what is the elder Pomerleau’s role?

“I’m the boss,” Tony Pomeleau insists. “I’m doing deals every day … moving that furniture store to Main Street in Newport. I got the Merchants Bank moving into my building in South Burlington … lots of deals.”

His speech occasionally stutters. “And and and so so so…” he growls. It’s not clear whether he’s lost his train of thought, or is simply determined to hold the floor until he’s ready for the next sentence.

He still calculates dollars and cents in his head and appears never to have forgotten a number.

“Now Price Chopper,” he begins, and outlines precisely what the CEO of the grocery chain expected to gross at a new store in Champlain, N. Y., and what Pomerleau told him he would gross – and just how wrong Price Chopper was and just how right Tony Pomerleau was: many million dollars right — “but don’t put that in the paper,” he says of the exact figure he names. “Price Chopper wouldn’t like it.”

“I make more money today than I ever made in my life, and I don’t need it. I give it away,” he says. “I’m not old, I’m here every day making all kinds of deals. Everybody has a time limit — except me.”

No regrets, no failures, no mistakes

It is a long drive from Burlington to Newport and back. Grace drives, but her father is in control.

“Turn here,” he says. As the miles pass by: “Don’t go that way… go this way… don’t miss the turn… keep going, I’ll show you where to stop.”

It’s a long enough trip for dozens of familiar anecdotes starring Tony Pomerleau: The “$237,000 profit in 90 days” story. The “I probably opened the first self-service supermarket in the country” story. The “how I beat two sharp guys from Boston in a real estate deal and made a couple million” story.

The car passes White’s Tree Farm on Vermont 15 in Essex. Hundreds of tiny Christmas trees grow in long rows.

“There’s a guy looking 20 years ahead,” he says and notes that he recently bought 18 acres across from the family’s expanding shopping center in Milton. Sometime in the future “it’ll be worth two, three times what I paid.”

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“There’s a time limit on everything — except me,” he says.

A reporter, probing, asks about him about failures, deals that didn’t work out.

“I don’t remember any,” he says. Earlier, it was suggested that his proposal for high rises on the Burlington waterfront — rejected by the city in the early 1980s — might be considered a failure. He brushed the thought aside.

Big regrets in his 95 years?

“No regrets,” he says.

His biggest mistake?

There is a long pause.

“The toughest was the wholesale business, but I made a success of it,” he says.

'I'm not quite as young as you'

It’s 8:30 in the morning when Pomerleau walks into the conference room at the Shelburne town offices. Town Manager Paul Bohne and Selectman Al Gobeille stand up. They greet him enthusiastically.

Around this town, Pomerleau is the hero of the moment. The future of the little Shelburnewood mobile home park in the center of town has been in limbo for nearly a decade as the park’s owner tried to sell.

Pomerleau stepped in earlier this year. His wife’s two caregivers live at Shelburnewood and asked him for advice. They were worried about the future of their modest homes.

He decided to buy the mobile home park, replace the aging and inadequate water and sewer lines and give the park it to its residents. He will retain another six acres of the 18-acre parcel for possible future development.

It is one of many acts of charitable giving that have become a bigger part of what people know about Pomerleau. There are the annual children’s Christmas parties in Burlington and Newport, the party for 1,200 Vermont National Guardsmen and their spouses. There have been million-dollars gifts to St. Michael’s College, the YMCA and to a fund to help mobile home residents rebuild after last year’s tropical storm.

He is scornful of businesspeople who, their fortunes made in Vermont, move their official residence to Florida to avoid higher taxes. “It’s wrong,” he’ll say. “You made your money here and Vermont needs you. I pay very big taxes and I never complain.”

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Now, he sits down with Bohne and Gobeille.

“First of all, I never went into a deal in my life knowing I was going to lose money,” he says. “The main reason I’m doing this, these people didn’t know where the hell they were going to go.”

He’s in the driver’s seat. He has agreed in principle to give the town a right-of-way for a new road through the Shelburnewood property. The town has a change in configuration to suggest. Bohne and Gobeille deploy arguments.

Pomerleau immediately makes clear he is not interested. Making changes would mean a longer time line for getting the project done.

“This would cause a lot of delay and I’m not quite as young as you,” he tells them.

“You’ve got another 10 years,” Gobeille joshes.

“Oh no question, no question,” Pomerleau says and changes tack. “No question your idea is good, but I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to delay it for those people. It would kill them.”

Bohne and Gobeille make one more pitch, then accept his refusal and drop their proposal.

Pomerleau repeats his objections anyway, one last time.

“For me, I think I’d rather stay with my plan. I might live another 10 years. Five, no question, but 10….”

'Everybody has a time limit'

Pomerleau pushes open the gate in the wrought-iron fence that surrounds the family plot at Resurrection Park Cemetery in South Burlington. “Plot” seems an inadequate word for this cemetery within a cemetery.

A colonnade of pointed cedars leads to a backless façade modeled on a Greek temple, its columns also recalling those at Follett House.

“I like columns,” he says. He guides two visitors past the statue of the Virgin Mary, past a bird bath, granite planters, stone benches, all carefully swathed in plastic for the winter. The flowers are beautiful in summer, he says.

“This was all my idea. I didn’t ask anybody. Didn’t want them to tell me what to do,” he says. He jokes, “My kids would probably put me in the woods.”

“This is my father here, and my mother,” he says, stopping by a row of five stones where he has moved the bodies of his parents, an uncle and an aunt. In an opposite line are the stones for the two daughters, Anne Marie and Ellen, he lost to cancer.

“Go over there,” he says, “Look at that one.” In a little nook off the main lawn, sits a stone for Jay Lefebvre, the family’s housekeeper of 40 years.

“I told her before she died, you are part of the family, you are going to be here with us,” he says.

He walks slowly toward the line of columns that serves as a dramatic backdrop. He climbs up three steps. Here, at the head of the family, a bit above them all, a pair of massive, polished slabs are set in the ground. Pomerleau’s name is carved on one, his wife’s on the other.

The man who constantly jokes that St. Peter has forgotten him has nevertheless prepared.

But Tony, one of his visitors asks, what about “everybody has a time limit — except me”?